An Interview with Michael Winterbottom, Director of "Welcome to Sarajevo"

An Interview with Michael Winterbottom, Director of "Welcome to Sarajevo"

An Interview with Michael Winterbottom, Director of "Welcome to Sarajevo"

by Stephen Garrett

After making his film debut in 1995 with the killer-lesbian, road-tripromance “Butterfly Kiss“, and following it a year later with “Jude”, anadaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure, director MichaelWinterbottom next moves to “Welcome to Sarajevo“, a complete departure fromthe filmmaker’s styles and a considerable challenge to audiences whereverit is shown.

Shot on location and intercut with documentary footage, “Sarajevo” brings tovivid life the intensity of war correspondence, and gathers together theconsiderable talents of lead actors like Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei, andEmily Lloyd, all of whom play supporting roles to the story of one man,portrayed by Stephen Dillane, who makes it his own personal crusade tosmuggle at least one child out of the devastated city to safety in anothercountry.

Using news journalist Michael Nicholson’s autobiographical novel aboutsaving a Sarajevan child, “Natasha’s Story“, as source material, Winterbottomand screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce have created a film thatunflinchingly depicts one of the most horrifying and generally ignored warsof the late Twentieth century.

indieWIRE: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has seen the film, hasn’t she?

Michael Winterbottom: That’s right, and now there’s a screening forPresident Clinton. And I think that Albright said that anything that makespeople think about Sarajevo is a good thing, especially since the[American] troops are supposed to leave next summer. So they’re beginningCongressional debates soon about whether they should stay beyond the middleof next summer. So I think they kind of felt that anything that remindedpeople about what it had been like might focus people on the fact that itis worthwhile to keeping the 8,000 troops there to maintain the peace.

iW:Did you ever think that you would be a political filmmaker? Had youconsidered yourself to be one before?

Winterbottom: I’m always a bit suspicious about that description becauseI’m not sure, really, what “political” means. I mean, I think these dayswhen the personal is political and the political is personal, it can meananything, really. So [the usage] tends to be to try and give significanceto something and say, “well, it’s a political thing.” The aim of this filmwas really to try and give some sense of what was happening there, to tryand show something of individual’s experience of Sarajevo and then maybefrom that to build up a bigger picture.

iW:But to have screenings for presidents is quite a change.

Winterbottom: Our hope when we made the film was that it might bringSarajevo to the attention of people, because the starting point for makingthe film was a sense of the bizarreness — that here’s a war happening inthe middle of Europe, we’re watching it on television, you can see it everyday, and yet we’re not doing anything about it — we’re not doing anythingto stop it. And suddenly when I went to Sarajevo the first time, that wasvery much the message I got from people we met. It was terrible to gothrough what they had to go through, but it was made even more frustratingthat they knew that people could see it and people were watching it as ithappened. So in a way, it was a bit like a spectator sport.

iW:What was it like working with the people at the Sarajevo-based SAGA Films?

Winterbottom: It was good. We saw them the very first time we went there,and we showed them the script and they read the script, and they were aboutto start filming their own film. But their attitude was: of course ours isa film from the outside, seen through the eyes of journalists coming towatch what’s happening. They were making a film from the inside. But theywanted audiences in America and audiences in Europe to see something ofwhat was going on. And so they felt the film reflected enough of theirexperience to be worthwhile working on. They wanted to be as closelyinvolved as possible. So they were really helpful.

iW:Originally Jeremy Irons was attached to the project in the main role ofBritish reporter Henderson. How did Stephen Dillane get involved?

Winterbottom: Once it was financed, that’s when we really started casting.And we met quite a few people. And certainly by the time we had metStephen, we kind of felt that, from multiple points of view — fromMiramax’s point of view, Channel Four’s point of view and my point of view— that he was the right person. He had a kind of presence and a kind ofquestioning, really. When I first met him, he said, “I don’t want to dothis.” And I think he felt nervous because he didn’t want to make a filmset in Sarajevo which was just about a British journalist. And that was myattitude as well. So I kind of felt that he would bring the same kind ofbalance, the same questions to what he was doing. And all the way through,he was very conscious of trying to make sure that the Sarajevan charactershe meets are just as important as his character. And I think that was goodin relation especially to Emira (Emira Nusevic), but also to people likethe little girl in the hospital, or the baker whose son is in the camp —in all those scenes, it’s very easy for the star, for the main actor todrag all the attention. And I think he was really trying to make sure thatthe other actors got their scene as well.

iW:The title originally was just “Sarajevo,” wasn’t it?

Winterbottom: I was sent the book, originally, and a screenplay by someoneelse, and those were called, “Natasha’s Story.” So then when I startedworking on it, I kind of felt that it wasn’t Natasha’s story — itshouldn’t be just the story of the girl. So we changed it to “Sarajevo,” asa sort of working title, really. Because no one was convinced that peoplewould flock to see it with that title. And then, in the film there’s alittle documentary bit where you see, scrawled on the wall, “welcome toSarajevo.” So that became the preferred option. Some people did feel thatwe should just take Sarajevo out of the title altogether, but I felt thatthe idea of the film was so much to be about the things that were happeningin that particular city, so it’s to be about the people from that city andto try and make people think about not only the characters in the film butall of the people that live there. And it would be wrong to suddenly losethat connection altogether and try and pretend that it’s just a film aboutjournalists.

iW:That’s the nice thing — for the first half or so, the film is so manypeople’s different stories; and then it just centers on Emira’s story. Itwas an unexpected turn when I was watching the film.

Winterbottom: Frank [Cottrell Boyce], in writing the screenplay, it wasalmost like short stories, like chapters in the film. And the centralthread is Henderson, but you should got off and see other people and thencome back to him. And generally we wanted to have a jagged rhythm and asmany surprises as possible. Because in living in Sarajevo, one of the worstthings would be never knowing what was going to happen next — never beingsure where the sniper was and where the mortar was coming from. And so thatsense of not knowing where the bullet’s coming from, in a way. We tried toput that into the storytelling as well.

Part of working on the screenplay was to watch as much as we could, so wewatched hundreds of hours of news archives, documentary footage — anythingwe could from Sarajevo. So we’d sort of seen all that and we hadincorporated specific scenes into the screenplay because of what we’d seen.So, for instance, the mortar that lands in the bread queue: we’d seen thatmaterial, that was an incredibly powerful sequence. It was one shot and itwas really the news cameraman running from one person to another person andback to another person, almost in a circle — and you could see thecameraman was incredibly panicked and didn’t know what to do. And then thesniper started firing and the cameraman was then running for his life. Andso, having seen that, I just felt that this has got to be in the filmsomehow. So we then got our [fictional] journalists to go and witness that,so we could include that in the story. And so then we had to recreate it aswell. So it was really working from the archive footage. And the generalprincipal was that if we can use the real footage, then let’s use the realfootage. And to try and recreate as little as possible.

iW:Were there a lot of stories which didn’t make the final cut?

Winterbottom: Certainly there were lots of stories that we wanted to havein the film which didn’t get in: stories that we’d seen on the news andsome stories that we did film — and then it was just too much, and therewere just too many stories. I wanted to make sure the film had this sort ofenergy and pace and compression that I felt the screenplay had. And Ididn’t want it to be huge and sprawling. The first cut was 3 hours ofincidents, so we pulled it down to something where you could cope with itand still get the sense that there were thousands of other people whoshould have been in the film.

[Stephen Garrett, a frequent contributor to indieWIRE, is a writer andeditor based in Los Angeles.]

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